Episode 7: Goudamutz and Clam Chowdah

In which Goudamutz and I eat a clammy tastin’ cheese – and a cheddar which will knock your socks off and into the washer (oh yeah and one zzzzz french cheese).

This is it folks, my last installment on the webcam with crappy sound.  Mobile HD coming soon!

Ok it was our last in Ptown and we were feeling a bit rained in an dorky.   You see….Goudamutz…*sigh*

We went back to Angel Foods.– Liz was a bit crazy busy so I just kinda grabbed what I thought looked interesting.   Also we  got these very tasty crackers from www.urbanoven.com for this vid…

Here’s what we ate our way through:

1. Robiola Bosnia made by a small family farm in Italy called Caseificio dell’Alta Langa.  This is a cow and sheeps milk mix cheese from the Piedmont area of Italy.  It comes wrapped in a pretty little package.    Super soft with a white rind.

According to Murray’s: It’s a luscious slab of creamy, buttery goodness that’s all satin on the way down. Oh my!

Supposedly it’s a great cheese for all to enjoy – even little Chitlins.

Ok here’s the deal – Goudamutz pointed out immediately that it tasted like clam.  That was confirmed by me.

Then when you added the stoned wheat thin….ClamChowder.

I’m not sure that’s what you want from cheese, but dear lord – it was clamtastic.

2. Bucheron made by Saint-Savoil in Poitou (in the Loire Valley) using powdered milk and frozen curd , it has a fuzzy white rind.

Bucheron means  lumberjack woodcutter or logger.

And the cheese is shaped like a log and small 1 inch pieces are cut off.  It’s a goat cheese that has to age quite a bit.  The cheese goes from being soft to chalky.  This was one of the first French chevres (goat cheeses) to come to america and its stocked everywhere supposedly. Mr. Jenkins really poo-pooed this cheese as very common – I thought it was good.   It supposedly is awesome on greens – We could see that.

I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok…

3. Grafton Gold Cheddar – Grafton Village Cheese company.

This cheese is aged 3 years and was super sharp and incredibly tasty!!!!  It is made with raw jersey cow milk in Vermont.  Grafton Village has been making cheese since 1890 and continues to do it ‘the old way.’  I’m super excited to track this place down this Fall and visit it.  Mr. Jenkins thinks this is the leading cheddar in America – I don’t have the experience, but it’s so freakin great – go. buy. now.  I love the hard wax shells these come in – gotta figure out why they do that.

Ok let’s take a moment on cheddar –  Mr. Jenkins has some cool things to say about how it produced.  Three basics steps of cheesemaking : produce curd, concentrate curd, and ripen curd.   Actually cheese making is really just a series of controlled stages of spoiling milk (ewwww) – the spoiling produces curds.    There’s lots of steps I won’t go through (I don’t know them all yet either), but in the second step, concentrating the curd, there’s a process called CHEDDARING – in which you achieve the cheddar-like texture .  It means you take thecurds and pile them on top of each other, cut them up, and press them together, and then pile them again.  This action allows large amounts of whey (Whey or milk plasma is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained) to be expelled , resulting in a very fine textured, dry, semifirm cheese.  You have to ‘cheddar’ to produce Colby, Cantal and Cheshire cheeses.

But enough with the learnin’